Abstract
With the publication in 1975 of George Steiner’s seminal After Babel, ‘cultural translation’ became the key concept in translation studies. Steiner took the problem of translation out of the hands of the hardcore semioticians and transformational grammarians, and gave it to all students of the humanities and social sciences, even if it is debatable to what extent they have accepted the gift. He did this by defining culture itself as the transfer of meaning across time and space. At the time, the model of human cognition, communication and culture was essentially ‘linguistic-semantic’ and text-based. Cognition was a matter of decoding meanings from signs; communication was a matter of writing signs into texts; cultures were literary texts to be read. Steiner was therefore able to claim that the fundamental process at work in any act of translation, as in any act of human communication, was ‘the hermeneutic motion … the act of elicitation and appropriative transfer of meaning’.1
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Notes
George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (London, 1975), pp. 426, 296.
See the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha, 2nd edn (London and New York, 2009), esp. the entry by Francis R. Jones on ‘Literary translation’ (pp. 152–7).
See Travels and Translations in the Sixteenth Century: Selected Papers from the Second International Conference of the Tudor Symposium (2000), edited by Michael Pincombe (Aldershot, 2004)
and Carmine Di Biase, Travel and Translation in the Early Modern Period (Amsterdam, 2006).
For ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignization’ see Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, 2nd edn (London, 2008), esp. pp. 1–34.
See James McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI (Oxford, 1965)
and Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven, CT, 2010), esp. pp. 218–21.
Michel de Montaigne, Les Essais, edited by Jean Balsamo, Michel Magnien and Catherine Magnien-Simonin (Paris, 2007), p. 382.
Translation based on Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M. A. Screech (London, 1991), p. 408.
Dominique Julia, ‘Reading and the Counter-Reformation’, in A History of Reading in the West, edited by Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier and translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 238–68.
I have written about this elsewhere in relation to the influence of the forms in which the late classical poet Musaeus’ poem was published in Greek and Latin, and in which Polybius was published in Latin as a supplement to Livy. See Warren Boutcher, ‘“Who Taught Thee Rhetoricke to Deceive a Maid?”: Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Juan Boscán’s Leandro, and Renaissance Vernacular Humanism’, Comparative Literature, 52 (2000), 11–52 and ‘Polybius Speaks British: A Case Study in Mid-Tudor Humanism and Historiography’, in Tudor Translation, edited by Fred Schurink (Basingstoke, 2011), pp. 101–20.
See R. R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries (Cambridge, 1954), pp. 506–41 (Appendix II);
R. R. Bolgar, with H. Nørgaard, ‘Translations of the Classics into English before 1600’, Review of English Studies, 1500–1700, 9 (1958), 164–72; and the RCC.
Richard Verstegan, The Post of the World … A Booke right Necessary and Profitable, for All Sortes of Persons, the Like before this Tyme not Imprinted (London, 1576) was translated and adapted from German without acknowledgement. See Paul Arblaster, Antwerp and the World: Richard Verstegan and the International Culture of Catholic Reformation (Leuven, 2004), p. 12 and the RCC.
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, edited by Francisco Rico, Joaquín Forradellas and Fernando Lázaro Carreter, 2 vols (Barcelona, 2004), I, 1249–50, for this and the following passage, discussed on p. 33.
Translation based on Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, translated by Edith Grossman (London, 2005), pp. 873–4.
Ian Maclean, Learning and the Market Place: Essays in the History of the Early Modern Book (Leiden, 2009), p. 42
and Massimo Firpo, ‘Ciotti (Ciotto), Giovanni Battista’, in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 25 (Rome, 1981), pp. 692–6. For Ciotti’s catalogue of transalpine books available via his shop in Venice see Giovanni Battista Ciotti, Catalogus eorum librorum omnium, qui in ultramontanis regionibus impressi apud Io. Baptistam Ciottum prostant (Venice, 1602). For examples from England see Brenda Hosington, ‘Commerce, Printing, and Patronage’, in OHLTE, pp. 47–57 (pp. 50–3).
Gaetano Cozzi, Venezia barocca: conflitti di uomini e idee nella crisi del Seicento veneziano (Venice, 1995), pp. 327–409.
Noel Malcolm, Reason of State, Propaganda, and the Thirty Years’ War: An Unknown Translation by Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 2007).
Gabriel Naudé, Bibliografia politica, edited by Domenico Bosco (Rome, 1997), p. 107.
See Paul Nelles, ‘Books, Libraries and Learning from Bacon to the Enlightenment’ in Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Vol. 2: 1640–1850, edited by G. Mandelbrote and K. Manley (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 23–35.
Florio’s prefatory materials make it clear that copies of many different editions were available. (See John Florio, The Essayes of Morali, Politike and Millitarie Discourses of Lo: Michaeli de Montaigne (London, 1603), sig. A6r.) In the early 1630s, Montaigne’s principal Italian imitator, Flavio Querenghi, was still using the Naselli 1590 translation, and had not yet obtained a copy of the full French text. See Luciano Stecca, ‘Montaigne e Flavio Querenghi’, in Montaigne e l’Italia: Atti del congresso internazionale di studi di Milano-Lecco, 26–30 ottobre 1998, edited by Enea Balmas (Moncalieri, 1991), pp. 83–102 (p. 85). There are — even if it is the roughest of indications — very few copies of early editions of the French Essais in Italian libraries to this day.
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Boutcher, W. (2015). From Cultural Translation to Cultures of Translation?. In: Demetriou, T., Tomlinson, R. (eds) The Culture of Translation in Early Modern England and France, 1500–1660. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137401496_2
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